


Love is for Children

by TheColorBlue



Series: if wishes were horses (beggars would ride) [1]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-11
Updated: 2012-09-11
Packaged: 2017-11-14 00:49:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/509554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheColorBlue/pseuds/TheColorBlue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Men like Clint Barton and Phil Coulson: they learn to think in seconds, and fractions of seconds. They learn to feel the fit of their own bodies intimately, finely tuned and minutely monitored.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love is for Children

Men like Clint Barton and Phil Coulson: they learn to think in seconds, and fractions of seconds. It’s not that time moves any more slowly or quickly for them, but rather they learn _how_ to move through time. They learn to feel the fit of their own bodies intimately, finely tuned and minutely monitored. 

Phil confesses to Clint one day, eating powdered donuts on the roof SHIELD HQ where Clint had been sitting: Phil feels old.

“Well, older than I used to be,” Phil says with a little laugh. “It’s just: unbelievable. Muscles aching later, and stamina not quite what it used to be.”

Clint shrugs, and accepts a powdered donut when Phil offers it to him. Clint knows he’s no spring chicken either. He might have helped save the world the other week, and he’s still the world’s greatest marksman, but. It isn’t like when he was a teenager, and sometimes it felt like he could live on sugar and caffeine, and everything was faster and easier. He might not have had his training and finesse back then, and yet. 

He sits at the edge of the roof and looks down, and then outwards towards the walls of the compound. 

Two weeks ago, Clint had thought that Phil was dead. They all had. And now Phil isn’t, and the Avengers are on vacation leave, or something, even Agents Barton and Romanov, and Clint still comes in to HQ most days to practice on the archery range. He utilizes the moving targets, and all the other bells and whistles they have available. It still isn’t too much of a challenge. Clint likes the repetition of the movements though: his hand fitting the arrow to the bow, and drawing the string back. The tension in his muscles, and the sensation of his own breath: then letting go. When Clint is on the archery range, he lets his mind goes quiet, the way he lets his mind go quiet when he’s on assignment, and he’s up in his nest, and there’s a kind of release. It’s maybe a contradiction of ideas, but he thinks better when he’s not thinking. He watches the world, and maybe there’s a kind of intuition involved, rather than trying to make his mind crank through every possible idea and variable at hand. He doesn’t know how people like Stark do it, their mouths moving and the words lining up, one after another after another. 

Clint doesn’t talk much. 

He thinks better when he doesn’t think too much, or over-think. 

That’s how it works on assignments, anyway. When he’s off, the suppressed anxieties seem to surface. It’s harder to make everything still again. 

He’s been thinking too much. At night, he wants to sleep, but he keeps waking up, tangled up in sweat-soaked bed sheets: Phil is dead, and Loki still has his fingers tangled up in Clint’s mind. 

Reality, for once, is welcoming. In the waking world, Phil is standing beside him, eating powdered donuts. 

Phil offers him another donut. Clint shakes his head, declining. 

It’s Friday evening at SHIELD HQ. The sun is low in the sky, and the parking lot is mostly empty, and Phil still moves stiffly from his injuries. Clint’s body still aches from being thrown through windows, from forcing his body to keep fighting through the hordes of Chitauri. 

Men like Phil and Clint learn to live in fractions of seconds, everything slowed down, and yet moving so fast. 

Clint is so very tired. 

Phil is looking down at Clint. There is a mild expression on Phil’s face, and Phil is many things, but he is not unkind. Clint has heard about the cellist who moved to Portland. Clint has never met her. He wonders, idly, what she’s like. He wonders if she is lovely. He wonders if Phil feels lonely without her—although the dream of it seems strange and surreal. He doesn’t know how Phil has managed any kind of love life, working the way he does. 

If Clint could—he nearly wants to curl up right there on the roof, to sleep and nest and forget. 

But Phil is kneeling down beside him—yes, kneeling! In his impeccably tailored suit, on this filthy rooftop, and his hand is touching Clint’s shoulder so gently. 

Natasha has said: love is for children. 

For some reason, Clint doesn’t think of love so much as he thinks of children. He thinks about being thirsty for something, and about empty glasses, and not remembering anymore what it was that could have possibly filled it. 

He’s still not sure what it is, that impossible, intangible substance. 

He stands up with Phil and takes the last donut when Phil offers again. He eats it and sucks powered sugar off his fingers. When he follows Phil to the stairwell, he is thinking of birds, and empty nests, and of desiring something so immaterial, so unattainable, that he might as well have been wishing for stars or a piece of the sky.


End file.
